Case Study : Manufacturing Power: Vendor Price Analytics Platform

Brief

Client needed their internal application to be able to process items from conflicting vendor catalogs. Becoming Machinic created a solution for a unified item taxonomy, and automated business processes previously done manually.

Problem

Manufacturing Power needed their internal application to be able to handle and process items from multiple conflicting catalogs. The client needed to be able to cross-reference price lists from differing vendor catalogs, as each vendor catalog contained different IDs and descriptions for the exact same items across catalogs. Manufacturing Power had been doing this manually, which entailed a significant labor cost, and a bottleneck in efficiently delivering pricing to clients.

Solution

Becoming Machinic designed and completely rebuilt the client’s web site, manufacturingpower.com, to spec, including a re-architected database schema. A “meta” part definition-level was employed in the database schema to be able to identify unique items across all sources, regardless of vendor or
catalog.

This solution eliminated the obstacle of multiple competing taxonomies in the final product, and optimized this process to create new efficiencies. The solution also flagged line items that could not be verified for administrative review.

Highlights

MySQL, custom backend (Java), custom frontend (AngularJS), database design, taxonomy.

Industry

Manufacturing
SIC: 50, 508
NAICS: 423, 42384

Location

Minnesota, USA

Product

Custom Development

Business Processes Optimized

Price Analytics